Life: Idiotropic

Today, in an attempt to beat the heat and actually have a little adventure, Tiara, Elise, and I dropped off Arianna and Luci at school and immediately set off towards Vaals, Netherlands to take advantage of the cool of the day and see Drielandenpunt. The "Three land point" is the highest point in the Netherlands and the place where the borders of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands all touch eachother. Only about 40 minutes from here, it is in hill country with lots of trees and rolling fields of crops and cows with many white half-timbered farmhouses sprinkled among them. The hill where the borders collide is a mishmash of curvy roads and tiny houses squished together, but the top is beautiful and forested with trails running throughout.

I had to get the traditional "tourist" photo-op... the cement pillar marking the point where the countries come together. On the ground in that circle, the lines are drawn out marking each border, so you could play twister and have a foot and a hand in each country - being in all three at once. Several tourists did that while we waited for our photo. It was fairly amusing.

We spent out time taking a long walk through the woods. The vegetation was strangely varied. In one area a dark forest flanked us to the right and a light green grove of trees flanked us to the left. The appearance of both were like night and day and the path we walked on separated them perfectly. In the dark grove, coming back, we noticed beer bottles stuck into the side of the pine trees collecting sap. We also noticed that this dark, forboding forest was not natural, but planted with the trees all growing in perfectly spaced rows.

A tall tower rose above the trees so that people could go up and see the view of all three countries. Unfortunately, I came unprepared. When in Europe, you must carry cash. There was no Geldautomat (ATM) thus no cash available, so we didn't get to go into the tower. I'd like to try to go back at sunset one day and take photos then. There were a lot of restaurants and tacky gift shops and a nice large playground for kids. It was obviously a big tourist trap and there were plenty of tourists there taking pictures and eating ice cream. Tiara and Elise played at the park. It was interesting with a lot of different spinning and swinging contraptions that you'd never see at a U.S. playground. Tiara was sad that she missed out of the Netherlands' largest maze that was there. It was getting too hot, so we had to head home. The maze looked fun though - a nice activity for a cooler day when you can afford to spend an hour getting lost in shrubbery.

Driving home took longer than planned. My trusty GPS, Stella, took us on the scenic route down the windy hill into Vaals, then around through some lovely hilly countryside, into Belgium, around in a big circle, into Germany towards Aachen, then back into the Netherlands and home again to Germany. Yeah. I felt a little spinny with all the tight turns through narrow streets and detours around dead-end roads. The positive is that I saw some absolutely beautiful areas that I wouldn't had seen and a cute little Belgian town that I'll revisit when I have more time.